Selenium Webdriver: Page factory initialization using paths relative to other elements?

Question

I'm trying to write a page object in Selenium Webdriver using the page factory @FindBy annotations. The page object is for a sidebar, and the parent WebElement containing all elements the page object needs to interact with is initialized in this way:

@FindBy (xpath = "//div[contains(@class,'yui3-accordion-panel-content') and child::div[.='Sidebar']]")
WebElement sidebar;

I then want the search input relative to this sidebar element. Is there a way to do this referencing sidebar element? I could copy and paste the entire path to the beginning:

@FindBy (xpath = "//div[contains(@class,'yui3-accordion-panel-content') and child::div[.='Sidebar']]//input[@id='search']")

But I'd much rather make it relative to the first element. Is anything like this possible?

@FindBy (parent = "sidebar", xpath = ".//input[@id='search']")

The Selenium documentation on the @FindBy annotation is a bit lacking...

Answer 1

The answer is to implement an ElementLocatorFactory that allows you to provide a search context (meaning, a driver or a WebElement).

public class SearchContextElementLocatorFactory
        implements ElementLocatorFactory {

    private final SearchContext context;

    public SearchContextElementLocatorFactory(SearchContext context) {
        this.context = context;
    }

    @Override
    public ElementLocator createLocator(Field field) {
        return new DefaultElementLocator(context, field);
    }
}

Then, when instantiating your page object, use this locator factory.

WebElement parent = driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[contains(@class,'yui3-accordion-panel-content') and child::div[.='Sidebar']]"));
SearchContextElementLocatorFactory elementLocatorFactory = new SearchContextElementLocatorFactory(parent);
PageFactory.initElements(elementLocatorFactory, this);

Now your @FindBy annotations will be relative to parent. For example, to get the main sidebar WebElement:

@FindBy(xpath = ".")
WebElement sideBar;